Through the years there have been many swing aids incorporating a hinged design as one of their features. In most of these designs, the hinge is of a fork type design; one hinge member has a pair of arms forming a fork, the other hinge member has a single arm (or tongue) which is received within the fork of the first member, while a pivot pin passes transversely through all three arms. These are easily constructed because the only stress vectors at the 90 degree angle are on the pivot pin and not on the forked sides. Examples of these are the Koch, U.S. Pat. No. 4,854,585, and Koch, U.S. Pat. No. 6,007,341. The inventor met Bob Koch in the 1990's when they both exhibited at the Orlando PGA show and at the ING conference at Hilton Head Island. The inventor was intrigued by Koch's version of a hinged training aid and even put Koch's original hinge on some of the inventor's products with good results.
The inventor then discovered in 2000 the tempo ratio of the tour pros and wrote the international bestselling book, Tour Tempo, published by Doubleday of New York in 2004. Because of the time frames involved in a tour pro's backswing, the inventor didn't want to concern himself about the hinge breaking in the backswing. Therefore, the inventor decided it would be more advantageous to have a hinged training aid that only hinged one way upwards at a ninety degree angle. Because of this, the inventor developed the invention described in Novosel, U.S. Pat. No. 6,558,267, which provided the aforementioned benefits but, of course, lacking the elastic member described below.
By accident, the inventor happened to revisit this invention after having some initial success with his students. The inventor had some of these clubs lying around against the wall one day when a magnetic scrap picker upper that he had ordered arrived at his home. He was planning to use the picker upper to pick up scrap parts of the golf shafts that he had cut for his various inventions. Reading the specifications for the picker upper it said that it had a 40 pound pull. Being by his practice clubs, the inventor decided to see if it would pull up the short end of the invention described in his Novosel, U.S. Pat. No. 6,558,267. Picking up the club and placing the magnetic end of the picker upper down by short portion of the club, the picker upper immediately pulled the hinge into a ninety-degree angle.
Seeing this, it occurred to the inventor that if there were a means to hold the shaft angle to ninety degrees and then release it, this might benefit his students by enabling them to experience and feel various important aspects of a true golf swing. It also occurred to the inventor it might be of substantial value to have a means to also allow the club shafts resume a straight line at impact from the ninety-degree angle and make the resistance variable to fit any type of golfer. Then, while using this new invention with a teen aged golfer, the young golfer went from shooting in the 90's before using practicing with the new invention to shooting in the 70's immediately after using it. Similarly, while using the new invention at the inventor's golf academies, all five adult students increased their drives by over 20 yards apiece
The inventor next applied the subject invention to other sports, specifically softball and baseball. The golf wrist trainer was modified by designing a similarly hinged bat. This hinged bat was then used by an Olympian softball player with every student in her batting instruction business in Kansas City with excellent results.
It was subsequently discovered that the invention can be used in the four possible configurations described below, and each of the four configurations help the student improve his or her back-swing, transition, and impact with the ball.